A Rookie’s Guide to American Design
Isabel Zedlitz, Co-Editor in Chief
As a rising junior, you are probably aware of the ever-mysterious American Design, a double-whammy of a course counting for both your English and history credits. However, American Design is neither a history nor an English class, but rather an Interdisciplinary Humanities course team-taught by teacher pairings. For the 2023-2024 school year, the pairings will be Dr. Wardrop & Mrs. Finley (aka FinDrop) and Dr. Hubbell & Mr. Peregrin (aka Pebbell). Casady’s flagship course, American Design, is an innovative, inquiry-based course that involves many traditional humanities skills, such as essay-writing and textual analysis, culminating in community-centric intensive projects called “Design Challenges.”
At the beginning of the year, I assumed, like many of my classmates, that AmDes would simply be a weirder version of a regular English and history class. I thought we’d be having Harkness discussions over the impact of George Washington’s Delaware crossing or what The Great Gatsby gets wrong and right about the roaring 1920s. I could not have been more incorrect. As the school year went along, and I dove deeper into the course, I realized that American Design is an empathy and action-based humanity course focused on developing students into strong and compassionate citizens and leaders. “The purpose all leads back to interconnection and awareness,” said Dr. Janet Hubbell, Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. “The course is driven by empathy, by setting down bias and judgment and opening our eyes to different kinds of struggle and context. We’re trying to create enlightened humans and service opportunities.”
One of the ways that American Design carries out this mission is in the form of “Design Challenges.” Chances are, if you’ve been in the high school for the past year or so, you’ve seen juniors scurrying cross-campus to conduct interviews on time during the Schoolwide Design Challenge, or booking it out of the parking lot to meet a client during a free period for the Citywide Design Challenge. Truly, the two Design Challenges at the end of each semester are the crown jewels of the course. The Fall Challenge consists of a class of AmDes students working with a Casady client to alleviate a small problem in their day-to-day operations. The Spring Challenge is far heftier, and AmDes classes are tasked with creating an innovative, sustainable solution to a problem for a client in the larger Oklahoma City area. For the selection of the Citywide Design Challenge clients, Mrs. Whitney Finley explained that “there are different topics throughout the year that the class studies, so we consider clients that are under those topics. Each of these organizations meets the criteria of a willingness to work with students and be excited about the challenge, and we then match the clients with class personalities.”
There are three main areas of focus for a Design Challenge: innovation, sustainability, and feasibility. The solution your class creates should be innovative, meaning the potential solution is something your client hasn’t considered or tried yet; sustainable, meaning the client will be able to continue using the solution after your class finishes the Design Process; and feasible, meaning the client can easily implement the solution without burden. To reach a solution that is innovative, sustainable, and feasible, you will follow the recursive six-step process originally outlined by Stanford University’s d.school: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Implement.
Empathize is the first stage of the Process, where you will sit down for interviews with your client and attempt to envision the potential problems from their point of view. I found that the Empathize stage was the most important part of the whole process, as you are unable to create an appropriate solution without first listening to your client and understanding their needs. Define follows Empathize, where you and your class will sit down and get to the root of your client’s needs. Your teachers will ask you to create a concise statement detailing your client’s problem and your pledge to create a solution that fits the three requirements of innovation, sustainability, and feasibility. Ideate is where the fun begins, and you will start to create potential solutions to design for your client. Dream big and narrow in for the best results. After Ideate, you will Prototype and Test potential solutions, reworking and fine-tuning them over and over to make sure they best fit the needs of your client. Finally, you will Implement. The final stage of the Design Challenge, Implementation means handing off your project to your client and working out any final details, so the solution can outlive your class to aid your client in perpetuity.
I will not sugarcoat it, American Design is a lot of work. It’s a new way of learning, and like anything new, there are some growing pains along the way. American Design challenged me to flip my perspective and shift my way of thinking about the world and the way I fit into it. American Design forces you outside of your comfort zone and encourages you to confront complacency in your life. There are times when I absolutely hated my assignments, but I always managed to find meaning in them later, occasionally to my chagrin. Nothing is done without intention, and everything builds off of the foundations laid in the past. I learned many things in American Design, including but not limited to never using vague pronouns and always double-checking the font of my footnotes. Ultimately, the goal of American Design is to create an environment that fosters personal growth and development leading into your senior year to prepare you as you enter adulthood and become active citizens and contributors to your community. Furthermore, American Design builds off of Casady’s “Portrait of a Graduate,” and encourages community engagement and “participat[ing] in positive local and global communities and embrac[ing] the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”
As American Design continues to make an impact within and outside of Casady’s gates, the bonds between our communities will continue to grow. The sustainability and evolution of the course are intrinsically tied to Oklahoma City’s continued growth, and eventually, American Design will have its footprint in many different organizations throughout the metro area. The adaptability of this course makes it unique, as it will never be the same from one year to the next. The class, like its students, will continue to change and grow to fit whatever the world demands of it, hopefully for the better. As the year closes out, and the Casady Class of 2024 moves onto our next challenges, I know that regardless of whether or not each student liked the course, we are better people for having taken it.
